


The Logician

by nolovelost



Category: Top Gear (UK) RPF
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-13
Updated: 2012-05-13
Packaged: 2017-11-05 07:59:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/404116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nolovelost/pseuds/nolovelost
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Behold, here, some of my May headcanon. This was also known as 'Starry, Stormy Night' for a while.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Logician

It’s such a quiet night that the very shift of James’ hair in the corner of his vision is making him twitch. After this has happened three times, he decides that his mind isn’t about to cease playing tricks on him, digs his phone out of the couch, and wanders upstairs. His flat is its usual mess – papers and motorcycle parts mingle downstairs, and papers and clothes dot the rooms upstairs. Thankfully, the kitchen keeps itself to itself mostly and the motorcycle and car bits haven’t migrated vertically. Out of the presentable chaos – he can’t argue, ever, that his home is close to organised – he can find whatever he needs, and people still don’t leave thinking he’s a complete grot.

He can’t quite pinpoint why he’s so on edge tonight, but he imagines it’s got something to do with the weather. It’s getting cold; his summer and autumn jackets are being replaced with the more substantial coats that live at the side of his closet and the cold wind cuts through his t-shirts whenever he throws his coat into the back of the car and leaps into the drivers’ seat, thanking his intuition that the black Panda tends to warm up when left outside during the day. But it’s never a pleasant experience to step outside. At the office, they sit around with mugs of tea all day and look around whenever anyone walks in, welcoming another refugee from what they all know will turn into a bitter winter. James has always had a sensitive internal barometer that, if he were a woman, he’d blame on his hormones and be done with it, but as a man he just has to sort of tune it out until it has anything important to say.

Mostly, it just tells him what’s out the window.

Which, this being England, isn’t usually very interesting. 

And, annoyingly, the instability in the night outside is mirroring itself in his inability to tune it out properly. Even though there aren’t any windows in the area where his hair keeps inordinately drawing his attention to, he knows what’s causing it and bed suddenly seems like a good idea, simply for the more enclosed, muffled space. His bedroom, mostly filled with the queen-sized bed, carries with it preconceptions he’s had since childhood of sleep, rest, and sanctuary. Even now, he may take his phone upstairs, but he leaves it on the table at the top of the landing. It means he has to stumble out half-asleep to answer whatever chaos may lie on the other end of the line and run the risk of falling down the stairs, but his office is only three steps from there and his room stays unblemished, full of books about trains and Agatha Christie novels. The bathroom and its underfloor heating, with the tiny, high-set window that lets him spy on the shifting London street far below and somehow mesmerising.

The paper hasn’t made it this far, unless they’re newspaper clippings or scribbled-on scraps of paper – dreams, ideas, to-do notes. He has a comfy chair in his office for any reading that ensues, and that has a better view anyway, so he’s always more likely to collapse there when there are things to be done.

But now James steps over the book he’s dumped beside the dark, wooden-framed bed, drops onto it heavily and reaches for the duvet with one hand and the lamp switch with the other. The curtains are already drawn to the back of the block and promise to keep out the sun that will rise imperturbably in nine hours, regardless of how much cloud has fallen across Hammersmith. His eyes fall shut just as the rain and the fog of the unsettled change begin to fall and muffle everything else out for him.


End file.
